At its annual GitHub Universe conference, GitHub is releasing three new Learning Lab courses, covering secure development workflows with GitHub, reviewing a pull request, and getting started with GitHub.

GitHub Learning Lab is an app that gives you a learning experience you can actively participate in, without leaving GitHub. You are guided through a series of practical, fun labs that will enable you to understand how GitHub collaboration operates with helpful feedback at each step. When the Learning Lab was introduced, GitHub said that

"After training thousands of people to use Git and GitHub, the GitHub Training Team has established a tried-and-true method for helping new developers retain more information and ramp up quickly as they begin their software journeys. And now, we're making those experiences accessible to developers everywhere with GitHub Learning Lab."

The way the Learning Lab works is that you learn through issues opened by a bot in a GitHub repository. After you finish tasks, the bot will comment on your work and review your pull requests like a project collaborator would.

The Learning Lab courses are available on Developer, Team, and Business cloud plans. Existing labs cover aspects such as managing merge conflicts, and contributing to your first open source project.. There's a course on Communicating using Markdown that teaches the Markdown syntax, and another on GitHub Pages that shows how to host a website or blog directly from your GitHub repository. The course on managing merge conflicts shows why merge conflicts happen and how to fix them, while the lab on contributing to open source works through making an open source contribution in a friendly mapping project.

The new courses extend the range to provide more choice. The first new course looks at how to work with secure development workflows with GitHub. The next addition works through the process of reviewing a pull request, and the third new course takes you through getting started with GitHub Apps, the officially recommended way to integrate with GitHub.

The GitHub Learning Lab for organizations goes further than the standard range of courses, letting you create private courses and learning paths, customize course content, and access administrative reports and metrics.

This is impressive for two reasons. One is the number itself and the other is that Amazon was prepared to disclose the information as it prepares to square up to Google at CES in Las Vegas next week.& [ ... ]

This isn't "big" news but it is ironic. Google has few enough ways of engaging with the public - could it be that closing down comments is just another way to avoid having to deal with complaints and [ ... ]